Everybody seems to be impressed with how evangelicals have become so much more socially conscious nowadays; but as someone who grew up in this tradition, I am as distressed as ever about what went on at Saddleback Church this past weekend.

What is so great about presidential candidates meeting in a church? The kind of religious group candidates meet with should not be an issue.

What horrifies me is the report card format used to measure the candidates, particularly when the issues are as significant and complicated as abortion. There really is a sense in which the medium becomes the message. The message must adapt to the medium, and therefore becomes shaped by it. In effect, moral questions become variations of asking for the meaning of life in 25 words or less.

The warts of the report card method for measuring political candidates are highlighted on the Jim Lehrer Online News Hour video excerpts which highlight the abortion portion of the proceedings at Saddleback Church.

To me it plays like a cartoon that creates the humor of grief — not the humor we usually think of as comedy.

Warren: At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?

Obama: “I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity is above my pay grade. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is I a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention.”

Warren: At what point is a baby entitled to human rights?

McCain: “At the moment of conception,” he answers promptly, with a slight “did I get it right?” inflection we can all recall from school days. Then the crowd claps as if he has just won a prize. McCain goes on to tell a touching personal story of his own adopted daughter; but this is irrelevant to answering a question about when human rights should be legally compelled in every case, which is what “getting human rights” is all about. But the crowd has been induced to produce more applause, and we are left here with a little vignette of the irrationalism that can be fostered in churches.

Shaping the Message

Notice there is a slight difference in these questions. The first question asks for a thoughtful opinion (“in your view”). The second one asks for a straightforward answer (“what… is”). In each case the requested answer was supplied. Perhaps this was because Pastor Rick Warren just responded to each man naturally because he really knew each one fairly well and wanted to make him feel comfortable. But the fact is that each one was “set up” to produce a different kind of response, and they produced it.

Much more significant, though, is the response of the crowd to Senator McCain’s precise and absolutist answer, which stands in sharp contrast to Senator Obama’s nuanced response. The crowd wanted the easy answer. Who cares about difficult cases? Let those people suffer in silence. The law of the land should enforce the right of a not yet implanted ovum to survive (since fertilization happens before implantation).

I suppose it would have been impolitic for either candidate to answer that “babies” should have human rights from the moment they are defined as “babies.” That would have been the Solomon-like answer; but we would not have accepted this response in our day. This answer would have pushed the issue into the kind of discussion it deserved, and the format did not allow for this kind of dialogue.

Ultimately such snippets of moral opinion by political leaders may have extremely little to do with their policy decisions. Only a more extensive discussion could have determined that. Apparently, from all reports I’ve seen, NOTHING was actually learned about how either candidate would actually lead the country on the abortion issue.

I did not see the complete televised discussion; but most Americans will not see it either. Most will not even see this News Hour excerpt. Those that care about the abortion issue will just erroneously hear that McCain does not believe in abortion and Obama does. There was no significant discussion of the abortion issue in this venue. When we read about the Lincoln-Douglas debates that focused on the moral issue of slavery in their era of American history, we see the candidates themselves conducted extended public discussions of this issue.

Now all we want to know is whether someone is Pro or Con.

Christians know Jesus said “If you are not on my side, you are against me. If you don’t gather in the harvest with me, you scatter it.” (Matthew 12:30) So we know that Jesus has drawn a line between faithful followers and those who are not.

But judging by how some Christians are reacting to the abortion issue it seems like some of us have let Jesus’ teaching form a paradigm in our mind for a host of other issues. This makes it easy, without even thinking about it, to identify following Jesus with following a political leader. If Obama is for abortion, then he must be against Jesus. We don’t even care if he really is following Jesus.

That really seems to be the template set in the brains of some Christians. Give credit to Rick Warren for trying to dispel that notion, even if at the same time he pandered to the majority that pays his salary.

Unfortunately this type of staging does not play well in the minds of many young people outside the Christian camp. They see these snippets and the mindless clapping in the name Christ, and they push further away. It’s hard for them to tell whether this is a scene from Saturday Night Live or if is it real.

Social action, yes. But social action characterized by love that draws people to Christ — not actions that push them away from him.

I think the message got distorted by the medium in this venue.

HHS Moves to Define Contraception as Abortion

In what it must consider an act of Wilberforcian moral leadership, the Bush administration seems to want to force an increase in the American birth rate and remove freedoms Americans currently enjoy in the name of freedom of choice for health care providers.

They propose to do this with the kind of superficial logic that manipulates thoughts the way someone first learning a foreign language manipulates words in a dictionary. Government officials transferred the reasoning they deciphered from public polling data into legal arguments as if the public has a consistent and logically held medical and ethical position on fertilization and abortion issues. They translated generic polling data into precise legal arguments.

You will have to read the logic for yourself as documented in this source; only the barest outline can be afforded in this post.

Here are key excerpts from this source:

There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus).

Up until now, the federal government followed the definition of pregnancy accepted by the American Medical Association and … the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is: pregnancy begins at implantation.

So [now] HHS proposes that anyone can enforce his or her own definition of abortion “within the bounds of reason.”

The practical outcome of this logic led to the next step in the following headline:

Redefining abortion

Federal officials considering a rule allowing health care workers to refuse to provide contraceptives

Already “an existing regulation allows health care providers with objections to abortion to abstain from providing it to patients.”

By extending the definition of abortion to cover contraceptives, the new rule being promoted at HHS “would allow health care workers who object to abortion on moral or religious grounds to refuse to counsel women on their birth control options or supply contraceptives.”

Who’s “Good” does this new rule serve?

1. Obviously this rule is not for the good of unwanted babies who will be born, since many providers may opt out. Nor is it for the good of poor people who will be channeled into less than healthy options for dealing with the resulting consequences of unwanted pregnancies or alternative attempts to avoid them. Given the state of the economy, we can be fairly sure that there is no intent to ensure that other providers will be made available in every situation.

2. The rule that exempted health care providers with objections to abortion from providing it to patients was good because it allows them to avoid the direct act of what they perceive as killing. But indirect acts such as providing supplies cannot so simply and so arbitrarily be prescribed because this is a far more complicated issue. Do everyday store clerks have the right to refuse to sell condoms? One can at least imagine a host of legal controversies and more business for the legal profession as a result. One can even imagine a backlash against the original exemption.

3. According to the Houston Chronicle, this federal administrative rule would probably void a great many state laws. This rule is obviously not for the good of democracy, because it does not reflect a democratic decision-making process nor does it come close to reflecting decisions made by that process in the past.

4. Instead, this rule is widely viewed as payback to the Christian and religious right for its support of the Bush administration. Perhaps it is a cynical concession to the belief that the Democrats will win in November and immediately overturn it. But what if they don’t win? After all, John McCain has sided with the religious right on abortion. Real leaders do not play with fire like this. One has to wonder whether tainted hiring practices have also affected this area of the Bush administration.

Fanaticism takes what is good to an extreme. As we pointed out above, exempting conscientious objectors from providing abortions was good. But sneaking in exemptions for indirect contributions, however defined, without extensive debate and democratic decision-making is fanaticism.

Avoiding fanaticism involves a bit of relativistic thinking. A truly Christian approach to social change is not absolutist. Following the Apostle Paul’s example, one does not simply appeal to God’s revelation, but also recognizes the importance of social mores, because the objective of God’s law is love and peace. The goal of such social action is always to gain voluntary agreement.

What is Good about this Rule?

Absolutely nothing as far as I can see, for reasons already cited above.

Then why is it proposed?

The stated reason based on public opinion polls cited and refuted above is also invalid. A professional philosopher could provide a better explanation and the Bush administration would have done well to consult one. Even research specialists would be able to spot some of the errors in this approach since they would recognize the limitations of interpreting social surveys.

The underlying rationale for the rule is patent, however. The rule extends the likelihood of denial of abortions by giving high status to the definition of pregnancy as simply fertilization (apart from implantation) and by allowing providers such as pharmacists who contribute indirectly to opt out of providing.

In giving “equal” status to such a narrow ethical stance it allows that view to dominate the broader approach much like having a significant number of non-drinkers in a church tends to mean that alcohol may not be served on church property even though there are also a significant number of drinkers, who may actually be in the majority. The strong must accept the weak, but the weak do not have to accept the strong, because the weak think they are right. A teaching that was intended to express mutual concern becomes a tool for domination of others in express violation of Jesus’ commands to the contrary. Christians who deny Jesus’ paradigm as they contend for the “kingdom” in the civil arena are doing no better than those Jesus condemned for their practice of Corban.

Incidents like these help us begin to understand why Jesus predicted that both the sheep and the goats will be surprised about the verdicts on judgment day!

I’ve already expressed my view on the fertilization issue in a previous post. It boils down to the belief that human beings are called to be more than mere physical matter, including even the aspects of soul that the Bible always associates with the body (which is everything that fertilization represents). We must be “called” in some sense to become human. In a Christian theological sense, we are all are born spiritually dead. To have any spark of life and a chance of making it, individuals have to be wanted. My mother-in-law used to tell my children they used to be “a gleam in your father’s eye.” For communities to survive, older members need to reproduce and draw younger members into them. There are no stand-alone human beings.

Our responsibility is to draw individuals into human relationships and into relationship with God. It is not an isolatable responsibility to protect fertilized eggs. You can’t ethically fulfill the duty of protecting a fertilized egg without also fulfilling the duty to draw that being into the human family. A commitment of our country to a higher birth rate given our history and current economic conditions must be accompanied by a correspondingly huge investment in relevant social services supporting this commitment. It is the very fact that this rule is being introduced in such a backdoor manner that demonstrates that it does not reflect the high moral caliber that its backers would like to claim for it.

I do not believe that the “fertilized” ovum that do not implant are human beings that will some day be resurrected like everyone else. But that is what you as a Christian believe if you believe what the Bush administration is promoting to take precedent over other established laws.

Does that sound “good” to you?